Furniture provided with doors or wings to close compartments and that open by pivoting around a horizontal or vertical axis use various types of hinge. One type that is very widely used today is that one in which the hinges for supporting the doors in a closed position are not visible from outside the furniture when the door is closed.
Hinges of this type are today commonly used in the furniture industry because they have a series of advantages that have determined their extensive use on the market.
Some embodiments of known hinges are provided with springs of various types to produce a return force during closing or a pushing force during opening of the doors to which they are fitted. This allows very precise closing or opening of the doors.
Nonetheless, damping and/or braking devices of the door movement, caused by the elastic reaction of the spring, are desirable in these hinges. The object of these devices is above all to prevent noise caused during closing operations by doors banging shut against the body of the piece of furniture.
There are currently various known damping and braking devices integrated in furniture hinges. One of these devices is described in the patent DE10121977.
This comprises a slider, brought into motion directly or indirectly by one of the hinge rockers, which has at least one sliding surface along a fixed surface of the hinge. A highly viscous grease is inserted between the surfaces. In the preferred embodiment the movable slider is disposed on the cup or box element of the hinge and the fixed surface is that of the outer base of said cup.
However, state of the art damping devices present some drawbacks. In particular, during the operation thereof, it has been observed that the first closing movement of the door or wing, after a certain period of inactivity, is not decelerated in a satisfactory way. A correct device operation therefore only takes place during the subsequent closing movements of the door.
This drawback is due to a minimal dissociation of the molecules constituting the high viscosity grease during the inactivity period of the device, a dissociation that disappears as soon as the molecules are moved in relation to one another following said first closing movement, thus amalgamating once more and recovering their cohesion force.
The need is therefore felt to produce a new damping device able to overcome the aforesaid drawback.